earing to turn just paler; and, with it, the latter now
_was_ listening. "You hear something?"

"I thought _you_ did." Winch himself, on Mark's own pressure of the
outside bell, had opened the door of the apartment--an indication then,
it sufficiently appeared, that Sunday afternoons were servants', or
attendants', or even trained nurses' holidays. It had also marked the
stage of his convalescence, and to that extent--after his first flush
of surprise--had but smoothed Monteith's way. At present he barely gave
further attention; detaching himself as under some odd cross-impulse,
he had quitted the spot and then taken, in the wide room, a restless
turn--only, however, to revert in a moment to his friend's just-uttered
deprecation of the danger of boring him. "If I make you take advantage
of me--that is blessedly talk to me--it's exactly what I want to do.
Talk to me--talk to me!" He positively waved it on; pulling up again,
however, in his own talk, to say with a certain urgency: "Hadn't you
better sit down?"

Mark, who stayed before the fire, couldn't but excuse himself.
"Thanks--I'm very well so. I think of things and I fidget."

Winch stood a moment with his eyes on the ground. "Are you very sure?"

"Quite--I'm all right if you don't mind."

"Then as you like!" With which, shaking to extravagance again his long
legs, Newton had swung off--only with a movement that, now his back was
turned, affected his visitor as the most whimsical of all the forms of
his rather unnatural manner. He was curiously different with his back
turned, as Mark now for the first time saw it--dangling and somewhat
wavering, as from an excess of uncertainty of gait; and this impression
was so strange, it created in our friend, uneasily and on the spot, such
a need of explanation, that his speech was stayed long enough to give
Winch time to turn round again. The latter had indeed by this moment
reached one of the limits of the place, the wide studio bay, where he
paused, his back to the light and his face afresh presented, to let his
just passingly depressed and quickened eyes take in as much as possible
of the large floor, range over it with such brief freedom of search
as the disposition of the furniture permitted. He was looking for
something, though the betrayed reach of vision was but of an instant.
Mark caught it, however, and with his own sensibility all in vibration,
found himself feeling at once that it meant something and that what